I’ve been working for awhile now to revamp the entire stats processing and graphing design in Faban. For those who haven’t heard of Faban, it is a performance tool that helps creation and running of workloads. Faban currently uses a technology called Fenxi to process and graph stats. Fenxi has given us lots of problems over time – it is poorly designed, lacks flexibility and doesn’t even seem to be maintained anymore. So I decided to get rid of it entirely.

I am really excited by the changes. I think this is one of the major enhancements to Faban since Akara (the original Faban architect) and I left Sun/Oracle.

So without much further adieu, here are the upcoming changes:

New cooler looking dynamic graphs

I’m using jqPlot that produces nice looking graphs by default. The ability to zoom in on a section of the graph is really very very nice, in addition to actually seeing the datapoint values as you mouse over the graph. This one feature I think will make the Faban UI more modern.

Provide support for graphing stats from Linux.

The Fenxi model does not support multiple OS’s well. So I’ve got rid of it completely. Instead, support for Linux tools (I currently have vmstat, iostat in) is added by using the post-processing functionality already baked into faban. The post-processing script will produce a ‘xan’ file (named after
Xanadu, the original internal name for Fenxi). The nice thing about the xan format is that it is highly readable by a human. Take a look at any of your current
detail.xan files produced by Faban. Very easy to read, so I’m sticking with this format.

New Viewer to graph all xan files

Of course, the above 2 enhancements are not possible without a way to actually interpret the xan files and convert them to jqplot json format. So a new Viewer has been implemented that renders the xan file nicely – both tables and graphs.

I’m attaching a screen-shot of a sample Linux Vmstat output to whet your appetite for the new features.